Mompetition Made Us Human

And it's not working anymore

Women Admiring a Child, Mary Cassatt

First: I have no children.¹ This gives me an infuriating amount of free time to write essays about my guesses about motherhood. Sorry everybody.

Every mother I know complains about mompetition; every mother I know engages in it. I don’t think that all of them could be wrong, either to engage in it or to complain about it. How to square the circle?

Whence Mompetition?

From the name, mompetition is obviously a competition between moms, but a competition for what? Okay, status, but what is the measure of status here? You don’t win based on, like, raw number of kids; shouldn’t that feel more confusing and surprising than it does? You don’t win based on having the most money—momfluencers even get demoted in the global mompetition rankings when it’s revealed they’re too rich to be relateable. You don’t win based on being able to beat up other moms, although I’ve heard from the best of you that sometimes you want to.

I think it’s useful to think of status as, like “a ranked prediction of how much someone can change your behavior compared to how much other people can change your behavior.”² Right now in evopsych-ish, this tends to be divided into two parallel hierarchies: dominance (physical force) vs prestige (everything else that can contribute to status), but I find it more useful to divide it into four categories, all of which can of course interact:

• Fame. It is much less likely (although I guess not impossible) to change someone’s behavior if they don’t know you exist. “Knowing someone” used to be basically always a two-way street, but recently it’s become possible for people to be known to others on a really wide scale, not necessarily reciprocally, so this one matters more than it used to. I think fame is basically a multiplier or characteristic of the other three categories, but you can also get fame for doing something strange.

• Dominance. Someone can change your behavior by forcing you to do what they want, or threatening you with physical force if you don’t do it. (Either directly through their own physical force, or through their command of the physical force of objects, or the physical force of other people.)

• Bargaining power. (This one is more provisional/idiosyncratic to my thinking; I’m not sure I’m defining it well or that I picked the right word for it.) Someone can change your behavior by giving you something that they have and that you want (an object they have, their time, information they have, etc etc etc) if you behave in a way that they want.

And then, finally:

• Prestige. Someone can change your behavior by making you want to copy them.

Prestige is incredibly important for moms, because moms are unavoidably structurally handicapped with regards to dominance or bargaining power. Moms are less dominant, all else being equal, because they’re physically weaker, and because they are hampered with children which makes it harder to fight. Moms have less bargaining power, all else being equal, because they need to give more of what they have to their kids, and can’t use it to bargain outside the family. Prestige is the only form of status hierarchy that doesn’t structurally disadvantage mothers.

So this is why individual moms might want prestige. But I also think the prestige competition among moms used to be much more functional—like, not necessary functional in the sense of “didn’t drive moms crazy,” I’m agnostic on that matter, functional in the sense of it used to do something helpful.

Parenting humans has a really long feedback loop. Intelligence requires large brains, large brains require being born underdeveloped (the obstetrical dilemma - heads gotta fit through pelvises), being born underdeveloped requires complex care over long childhoods, then by the time your kids are grown up and you know the results of your mothering, you’re menopausal. Because the feedback loop is too long for mothers to learn purely from their own experience and reasoning, by iterating and thinking rationally about the results of the iterations, it’s really really important to copy other mothers. And it’s really really important to know which mothers to copy.

Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of our Success³ has some examples:

[S]ocieties who have relied on bitter varieties [of manioc] for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning…indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique…

[O]ne person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. [T]he children and adolescents who are learning the techniques…would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting).

…Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning.

Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque—an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology.

(Emphasis mine.)

So that story shows how reason is not sufficient for learning how to mother, because of long feedback loops. Here’s another example that is more explicit about the “prestige competition” aspect of learning how to mother.

…during both pregnancy and breast-feeding, women on Yasawa Island (Fiji) adhere to a series of food taboos that selectively excise the most toxic marine species from their diet. These large marine species…contribute substantially to the diet in these communities; but all are also known in the medical literature to be associated with ciguatera poisoning…

This set of taboos represents a cultural adaptation that selectively targets the most toxic species in women’s usual diets, just when mothers and their offspring are most susceptible. To explore how this cultural adaptation emerged, we studied both how women acquire these taboos and what kind of causal understandings they possess. As adolescents and young women, these taboos are first learned from mothers, mothers-in-law, and grandmothers. However, this initial repertoire is then updated by a substantial portion of women who learn more taboos from village elders and prestigious local yalewa vuku (wise women), who are known for being knowledgeable about birthing and medicinal plants. Here we see Fijian women using cues of age, success or knowledge, and prestige to figure out from whom to learn their taboos. As explained in earlier chapters, such selectivity alone is capable of generating an adaptive repertoire over generations, without anyone understanding anything.

(Emphasis mine.)

So these are structurally the same as modern mompetition: copying other mothers on the basis of their prestige, even not knowing exactly how (or even whether!) which behaviors create which good outcomes. And it works! Mothers in these environments who decided, “You know what, all this mom guilt is petty. I’m tired of judging and ranking other mothers. She can do all this fussy manioc processing if she wants to, and be orthorexic about shark meat, but I’m gonna give myself a break,” ended up with poisoned kids and less descendants.

Now think about how this spirals over generations: slightly larger brains enable slightly more sophisticated prestige detection but require longer & more complex care in childhood, slightly better prestige detection enables slightly more reliable identification of and copying of successful care practices, slightly more reliable transmission of effective practices enables raising more altricial infants, more altricial infants can support larger brains. Each turn of this spiral increases intelligence, children’s dependency, and social sophistication. We're the species that used maternal status competition to bootstrap ourselves into being smart enough to be really good at maternal status competition.

Mompetition why not?

Moms truly hate mompetition right now. Mompetition has become more intense at the same time as it has started giving worse and worse information about who to copy.

Mompetition is increasingly not a local competition but a global competition, and it increasingly takes place online. It’s much harder to win a competition between every mom on the internet than it is to be the best mom in your city’s Junior League. And although in a sense you can get more information online—it’s also true that the moms we follow, envy, judge online are filtering their lives.

The obvious way that moms filter their lives, the one people talk about, is that moms talk about the good stuff, show off, brag, and don’t talk about their struggles. Prestige comes from making people want to copy you, but there are two ways to do that. You can make people think they should copy you by being someone who is actually good to copy, or by making them think that you are good to copy.⁴

In response, there’s an increasing trend to want mom content that’s “realistic” and “honest,” but that doesn’t solve the problem. The filtering is unavoidable. Things are online because people decided to put them online. Even if they’re trying to be realistic and honest, they’re choosing what goes up based on what seems salient and important to them. That is just less information-rich than watching the moms you know in real life, whom you can “catch” doing stuff that they wouldn’t put online. That doesn’t have to be bad stuff! It could be good! Like, maybe it wouldn’t occur to some mom to post on Instagram about how her kids always serve their own plates at dinner, because to her it just seems like a small unimportant convenience—but actually it’s a big factor in how her kids learn to listen to their intuitions about food, helping them with their physical health and defusing neuroses about food and weight.

An even more serious blow to the functioning of mompetition: society is changing faster than the generational feedback loop. It’s literally impossible to make long term observations about, eg, how kids interact with technology, because technology is changing faster than kids grow up. People have to make decisions about, say, TikTok without seeing adults whose parents took different TikTok approaches; if the way to detoxify manioc changed every generation, we’d see a lot more cyanide poisoning. So, like, some mothers will still be better (for you) to copy than others, but it will be harder to tell who.

Mompetition has intensified at the same time as it’s become much less functional—no wonder moms hate it.

What if no more mompetition?

I think there would be serious downsides to just disengaging from mompetition, even though I think it works less now than it used to for helping people raise healthier/happier kids.

People talk a lot about wanting motherhood to be higher status—often the same people who are talking about hating mompetition. I think both desires are, like, right, but unfortunately I think they are fundamentally in tension.

I’m willing to bite one bullet and say that, all else being equal, moms deserve higher prestige than women without kids (I have no kids, I get the pass to say this)—if only because most “women without kids” are really “women before kids” & “future moms copying current moms” makes more sense and flows more naturally than “moms copying nonmoms.”⁵

But I can’t figure out a way around the problem, that, like…motherhood as a field only gets prestige if mothers are worth copying—if what they do matters to their results. And if mothers are worth copying, if their actions matter to their results, then some mothers are more worth copying than others. I would be much happier if things were different, if you could just kind of grant status to people doing hard & useful things, but that just doesn’t seem to be how the world works. Basically every high-status field is a highly internally-competitive field, it seems unavoidable.

The motherhood penalty for careers is a concrete example of how motherhood is low status, and I think that careers are a place where motherhood gets especially low status, not because motherhood is judged, but precisely because it isn’t. Let’s take as a given that the motherhood penalty is worse than the career penalty for switching careers, although I’m not sure that that’s true. Why would that be? I think the answer is that when people switch careers, employers are judging their previous careers in comparison with other previous careers of other applicants. The judgment might not go in the applicant’s favor—but it also might! The employer could judge their previous career and think it makes that applicant a great fit for the new job.

But for the most part, when mothers return to the paid workforce after leaving (or even scaling back their involvement in) the paid workforce to do childcare, I think employers are not judging and comparing the mothering done by different mothers, so women can’t be rewarded in their careers for the quality of their mothering.⁶ The time spent mothering is a blank because it can’t be judged. The only alternative to the career penalty for carers (as far as I can tell) is that some women get preference for jobs over other women because employers have judged them as better moms.

It’s bananas, but I was kind of hoping that, by the time I finished this essay (which I’ve been thinking about, arguing about,⁷ writing about, for a little over a month) I would have, like, (without any personal experience in the matter) figure out some solution for this—in fact, I haven’t even figured out how to write a concluding paragraph. The best individual solution I can come up with is still to just ignore it (which I probably would have tried to do anyway; when given the choice to play high or play low, I tend to play dead, & when I don’t I’m bad at it enough to hurt feelings)— or only pay attention to and participate in mompetition on a local scale. This still leaves a hell of a lot of problems. The problem that competing for status is miserable and not having it isn’t great either. The problem of how to figure out how to be a good mom when childhood is too slow to learn parenting by reason, and the world is now too fast for you learn it by example.

1. Yet.

2. This is not exactly the same thing as power, imo, because power includes ability to affect the physical world. Also I think status should only count as power insofar as the person with status is intentionally trying to change your behavior, and you’re not just responding to their status in ways they may or may not want (for instance, if you let the popular girl copy your homework when she asks, that seems like power; if you copy the popular girl’s outfit, it’s because she’s high status, but she doesn’t particularly want lower status people to copy her outfit, so it’s hard to say that’s power per se).

3. Which I read because of Scott Alexander’s review.

4. I used to be confused about why women tend to obscure the results of prestige competitions. It seemed self defeating. You can’t really obscure the results of dominance competitions, and women can’t win dominance competitions, so obscuring the results of competitions means basically highlighting areas where men can win and obscuring the places where women can win. But “directly, obviously caring about prestige competitions” is a really good signal that you’re goodharting directly for winning the prestige competition, not doing stuff that could actually help people, so it makes sense that people competing for prestige would obscure that a little.

5. And, like, all else isn’t equal. That’s why people choose to forgo or put off motherhood. Some women aren’t moms, or aren’t moms yet, because they can’t despite trying. But a lot of women aren’t moms, or aren’t moms yet, because we choose not to be—because we’re doing something else with the time, effort, resources we would be spending on our kids if we had them. And those are areas where we have a competitive advantage against mothers. So it doesn’t really seem unfair to non-mothers if mothers get status for being mothers.

6. I am not saying it would be straightforwardly good if employers did judge mothering. It’s ripe for goodharting, they would have to judge on very seeing-like-a-state measures, the kids’ grades, where they’re going to school, etc—and moms who want to go back to careers would be parenting more towards these measures, which I dont think would necessarily be good.

7. Good naturedly! Socratically!